Navigating the policy landscape: barriers and synergies in strategies for climate and biodiversity

Beskrivning

There is no shortage of strategies aiming for sustainable development in general, and for climate and biodiversity goals in particular. On the contrary, strategies for societal transformation spanning the local, national, and global levels, are abundant. Still, key environmental goals are oftentimes not achieved as current climate and biodiversity strategies often fail due to, for example, gaps between overarching goals and the concrete policy instruments in-use, implementation challenges, conflicts between different environmental strategies, with strategies in other policy areas, or with the agendas and actions of business and industry, organizations, civil society, and single individuals.

This project puts attention to firms and industries as they have a central role in supporting societal adaptation to the physical impacts of climate change, especially in more directly affected sectors such as agriculture, forestry, construction, or transportation. However, the business and management field has repeatedly been criticized for its lack of engagement with climate change. While public and policy interest started already in the 1980s, the main driver for corporate strategic change was the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. However, after the Kyoto agreement the corporate response seems to have been largely defensive or hesitant. For the most part, however, a wait-and-see attitude prevailed in the corporate world during the 1990s. Scholars have frequently pointed out that climate activities and barriers against action are not uniform for businesses and that the factors that either enable or constrain action are very context specific. This observation directs attention to the need to narrow down the blend of factors that promote or inhibit Swedish corporations’ responses to climate change policies. This project will explore how various climate strategies targeting corporate actions and activities are supported by larger corporations in Sweden and the effect on the development of corporate environmental strategies.

This sub-project is part of a larger project conducted within cooperation with researchers at Uppsala University, Luleå University of Technology (LTU), University of Gothenburg. Program leader Simon Matti (LTU).